I had just attended the fall conference of the Florida Association of Computer Users (FACUG) in Sarasota. I rode back to Tampa all smiles because I had won, in the raffle, Microsoft’s Office 2000 Premium Edition. In the mail the next day, I receive promotional material from a company called Wildfile. They send the group a copy of "Go Back" for review. I took this as an omen and decided to install, review and use Go Back before installing Office 2000. Yes, I am a chicken when it comes to installing Microsoft new releases.

Wildfile is a 19 year old Minnesota company that specializes in the development of multimedia systems and other software products. Wildfile says Go Back belongs in a new software category called Time Travel Technology. Released in December 1998, Go Back was designed to fill the gap between the undo button and tape recovery. By continually monitoring changes to your disk, Go Back can return your hard disk to the way it was minutes, hours and even days ago.

Enough of the hype, now on to the program. I was worried up front that it would take too much hard drive space. The only information I could find on the subject was "Go Back stores special information on the existing hard drive that allows it to re-create the past. It is recommended that users reserve 10 percent of hard drive space for GoBack’s use. More or less space can be reserved, depending on user needs. However, if less space is reserved, users will have a shorter reach back in time from which to retrieve data." Finding percentages involves the use of division, so I decided to move on and take my chances.

The program allows you to set how much hard drive space to allocate. For my four Gig drive, it recommended 280mb, but I changed it to 150 because my hard drive is getting full. It installed in a few seconds and then needed to restart my computer. After rebooting the program went to all the drive partitions and appeared to scan them. 45 seconds later the computer rebooted again. Looking at "my computer" shows Gb_21d(H:), which I assume is a virtual drive.

According to the "short video" on how to use GoBack, "If you cannot get your computer to run properly, then use GoBack to step back in time. First restart your computer. (Turn the power off and then on, or press the reset button.) Now get ready to press the space bar. Early in the start up process you will see the GoBack Boot Screen. Press the space bar when prompted. You will have about five seconds to press the space bar. If you miss it, simply restart your computer and try again. Next, you will be given the option of returning your computer to exactly the way it was at an earlier time." Lost files are recovered by double clicking on the icon and using GoBack to recover the file. You can make a back up after you need it, by reverting the computer to "the way it was" and then backing it up.

If you have created a document that you don’t want to come back and haunt you (e.g., a love letter), you should clear the GoBack history. Click on the Options button in the main GoBack Menu to bring you to this option.

I permanently deleted many files and they were all brought back seamlessly. I hope I don’t need to use this program because of a major problem and I hope it works if I ever need to. I plan to install the Office 2000 programs with the hope that all goes well. If it doesn’t, I’ll be writing follow up articles.

http://www.goback.com/ u